Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt revealed the first full-color images and data collected from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on July 12. The telescope is the first to observe some of the earliest galaxies in the universe, according to NASA.
Work on the JWST began in 1995. Goddard has been managing the project, with many Greenbelters contributing to the telescope.
NASA has been collaborating with the European Space Agency (ESA) and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to progress the JWST project. Current project manager Bill Ochs assembled a team of 20,000 people around the world to make the project possible, said John Mather, senior project scientist for the JWST and Nobel Prize winner, during the unveiling of the first photographs on NASA Live opening remarks.
“This is our time machine and I just wanted to be a part of it. I am so thrilled that we got a chance to do it,” Mather said. We can also see closer to “the beginning of everything” using infrared light that creates images with more clarity than ever seen before, according to NASA.
The Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), “was the multi-object spectroscopy mode, a key capability that allows Webb to capture spectra, or rainbows of infrared light, from hundreds of different cosmic targets at once. In multi-object spectroscopy mode, NIRSpec can individually open and close about 250,000 small shutters, all just the width of a human hair, to view some portions of the sky while blocking others,” said Alise Fisher in a press release on the James Webb Space Telescope Blog on July 7.
“All of the seventeen ways or ‘modes’ to operate Webb’s scientific instruments have now been checked out, which means that Webb has completed its commissioning activities and is ready to begin full scientific operations,” according to a press release from Thaddeus Cesari of NASA’s Goddard on July 11. “Each of Webb’s four scientific instruments has multiple modes of operation, utilizing customized lenses, filters, prisms and specialized machinery that needed to be individually tested, calibrated and ultimately verified in their operational configuration in space before beginning to capture precise scientific observations of the universe,” Cesari stated.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were joined by Jane Rigby, project scientist for operations for the JWST, Bill Nelson, NASA administrator and other senior officials on July 11 for a preview photo release of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.
Biden called the JWST “astounding” and said that sharing these images is, “a historic moment for science and technology, for astronomy and space exploration, for America and all of humanity.”
“The amazing thing about Webb [JWST] is the speed at which we can churn out discoveries,” said Rigby while releasing the first JWST Photo on NASA Live, “so everything that you’re going to see here in this broadcast is a week, and we’re going to be doing discoveries like this every week.”
Visit nasa.gov/webbfirstimages to view all the images released at this time.
To watch the release of the first full-color images, visit nasa.gov/nasalive where experts describe each image in detail.